Two Dimensional War and “Cyber-Propaganda”

It is really interesting to notice the growing role of “Cyber-Propaganda” inside the Cyber War (yes, now we are authorized to use this term after this statement) that the Anonymous collective has declared against Israel.

On one side the cyber-attacks are escalating. After the list of 700 websites defaced or totally deleted (including the databases of The Bank Of Jerusalem and the Ministry Of Foreign Affairs), in the last hours the hacktivists have dumped a list of donors for the Unity Coalition for Israel (“the largest network of pro-Israel groups in the world”), hacked and defaced the Israeli Bing, MSN, Skype, Live websites, and leaked information of 5000 Israeli Officials.

On the other side, Israeli officials are downplaying the impact of the attacks claiming that “Anonymous’ Massive Cyber Campaign has been a flop”. According to the Israeli Finance Minister, Yuval Steinitz, on the wake of the dramatic events of Gaza, Israel has been hit by 60 million of hacking attempts (“normally” Israel faces hundreds of attacks every day). The minister also claimed that all of the attacks have been mitigated, except one that has been able to knock a website offline for only 10 minutes.

Looks like the two contenders are representing two completely different scenarios.

Meanwhile OpIsrael is going on and has just entered Phase II called PillarsOfAnonymous (a clear reference to “Pillar of Defence“) with a list of 117 Israeli governmental sites knocked offline.

The way in which the two contenders are representing the same events confirms that the battlefront is completely two-dimensional even considering the actions of propaganda which now also include the reports of the cyber-operations. Maybe in this case the Israeli situation in the cyber-plane is pretty much different (and pretty much complicated) since it has not a single state (or a finite number of states) to counter-attack, but a huge widespread network of “volunteers” which is practically impossible to strike.